Monday, October 29, 2007

The mystery of how Google ranks the quality of a particular website is - like the whereabouts of Osama, how Promises stays in business...& Paris Hilton - developing one of the great unsolved puzzles of our time. The subject of countless articles, blog posts, and even an entire industry devoted to making your site sexier in the eyes of Google, PageRank (PR) was devised by co-founder Larry Page during his Stanford days spent researching a new breed of search engine. PageRank (yes, it's spelled that way, and yes, it's a trademark of Google) denotes whether Google deems your site valuable & where on their food chainyou rate on a scale of 1-10; ten = good, one or less = bad (& very bad). Not only does PR affect what you can charge for advertising, but it directly impacts where you place in a Googlesearch and your corresponding Google traffic.Lucrative LinkwhoringNaturally, an industry has sprung up to help lesser sites buy their way to a higher PR. Although ethically questionable, a number of larger blogs have been accepting payment in exchange for linking to lesser sites - solely for the purpose of boosting the smaller site's PR. Linkwhores & so-called Blog Link Farms fill their sites with these lucrative links to the lower foodchain sites, regardless of whether the content of the lesser site actually relates in any way or is deserving of a higher PR.

As a result, Google recently penalized a number of high profile, popular sites by significantly lowering their PR. Forbes, The Washington Post, Chicago Sun Times, San Francisco Chronicle & Engadget all dropped from PR7 to PR5; ProBlogger & CopyBlogger from PR6 to PR4, and the longtime #1 listing in the Google search "Make money online" -

John Chow - was completely removed from the index; search for "John Chow" now & JohnChow.com comes up around page 7 notes Courtney Tuttle. (Search Engine Land has a more complete list of the major sites who lost PR ranking.)

A Google-Sized HypocriteAccording to Google, the official reason for the PageRank adjustment is to preserve the quality of links & ensure they lead to relevant editorial content rather than a "bad neighborhood"; ie. to help protect users from inadvertently clicking on an unrelated site (essentially like clicking on an ad) or ending up on a web-spamming site. It is their search engine so they have every right to penalize you for selling links, points out Search Engine Land about the fact that Google isn't actually dictating to people what to do with their sites. "Don't care about Google?" they ask. "Sell all the links you want...If Google traffic is important to you, don't sell links."

Mashable illustrates the hypocrisy of Google's PageRank punishment by showing how your typical Google search yields well-placed AdWords which lead straight to an impressive quantity of link spam. And the company's apparent lack of loyalty has offended a googol-sized group of early adopters whose enthusiastic word-of-mouth rave reviews initially helped sell Google to the non-tech masses. "The people who supported you in your early years and the people who have the ability to influence the non-tech folks...those are the exact same people you are currently attacking," warns a disappointed Twenty Steps. "It’s not a wise move to piss them off in great numbers. Sure, you’re currently top of the pile but with every one of your snidey little digs at the SEO community or the web development community or the blogging community, you chip away at your power base."

In a delightfully dramatic flourish, he even quotes the lyrics from an 80s Human League hit:

You were working as awaitress in a cocktail barWhen I met youI picked you out,I shook you up and turned you aroundTurned you into someonenewNow five years later on you’ve got the world at your feetSuccess has been so easy for youBut don’t forget it’s me whoput you where you are nowAnd I can put you back downtoo

And TechWag finds a silver lining in the fact that the downgrade against massive sites, combined with the fact that good content is now a more valuable tool for luring people to your site, is actually good news for smaller blogs. Why? It rewards what we do best - blogging. "Pretend like search engines are not even a traffic option, and instead focus on repeat traffic and referral sources that no one can take away," advises CopyBlogger, explaining that the real reason for their success has been to ignore SEO gymnastics & subterfuge, and focus instead on producing high quality content. "While people work hard to attract links to rank better in search engines, you’ve got to realize that some of the highest quality traffic comes directly from the links."

After spending a solid week reading more than I could digest about SEO and then attempting to implement such information, I realized I lost a week of writing. Unfortunately, page rank has outranked writing. But I am going back to writing.